Glossary Term – Event

The Columbian Exchange refers to the flow of people, animals, plants, and microorganisms between Europe and Africa, and the Americas. For American Indians, disease was the most significant effect of the exchange with as much as 90 percent of the Native population dying during the first century of interaction. For Africans and Europeans, the most important effect was the arrival of new American crops that increased food supplies significantly. This led to population explosions in Africa and parts of Europe, which fed migration from those...

Glossary Term – Organization

The Dutch West India Company was formed in 1621 with a charter to establish colonies in North America in part to prevent the growth of rival empires. The company’s director, Peter Minuit, negotiated the acquisition of Manhattan from the Manhate Indians in 1626. Though it had essentially been granted a monopoly on trade with the Americas, the company’s attempts at attracting Dutch settlers were largly unsuccessful. The company also took part in the slave trade, moving slaves from the west coast of Africa to the West Indies and South America...

Glossary Term – Person

Henry Highland Garnet (1815–1882) was a black abolitionist and clergyman. Garnet escaped from slavery with his family as a boy and settled in New York City. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in 1841 and soon became a well-known anti-slavery advocate. In 1843, he proposed militant slave uprising, putting him at odds with more centrist abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass. During the Civil War, Garnet helped recruit African Americans for the Union Army. He later supported black emigration to Africa, and in 1881 he was appointed...

Multimedia

Multimedia

Brian DeLay, associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, discusses how the backwater of western Europe emerged from the devastation of the fourteenth century to generate the power, wealth, knowledge, institutions, and energy to initiate and develop a worldwide expansion.

Multimedia

Historian Philip D. Morgan, Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, explores the core experiences of slavery itself, including life on the African coast and on sugar plantations in the new world.

Primary Source

Primary Source

Olaudah Equiano purchased his own freedom in England and published his autobiography in 1789. Many people read Equiano’s Narrative, and his account exposing the horrors of slavery influenced Parliament’s decision to end the British slave trade in 1807.